Steve Dwoskin's “documentary” is a film journey through the photographic atmospheres of Bill Brandt--Britain's late master photographer, who joined the surrealists in Paris in the 1920s, adopted England and photo-journalism in the 1930s, and at the end of WWII, began the landscapes, portraits and remarkable nude studies for which he is perhaps best known, and which were his own favorite pictures. The nudes and portraits are the focus of Dwoskin's journey, which is likened to Alice's adventures in Wonderland, a book loved by both photographer and filmmaker. Dwoskin's camera glides through the rooms in Brandt's house, encountering the photographs, which are often placed where they were taken. Brandt's stark black-and-white photography is mirrored by Dwoskin's, as is his love of deep focus, inspired by Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, with its extremes of scale and harsh contrasts of light and shadow.
This is the first film on Brandt to have been made with his full cooperation. Brandt and Dwoskin were not only friends for many years, but admirers of each other's work, and Dwoskin's filming “has the paradoxical effect of making Brandt's photographs the most Dwoskin-like images in the film.... Dwoskin gives us not only a portrait of the artist, but a reflection of his own past work.” (London Film Festival, 1983) All of Dwoskin's films (Dynamo, Death and Devil, Behindert to mention a few), have a haunting and obsessive quality. Shadows from Light dispenses with the usual trappings of the documentary; neither a biography nor an analysis, it is a film evoking the emotional content of Brandt's photographs, drawing out their surreal undertones. (Selected for 1983 London Film Festival and 1984 Rotterdam Film Festival.)